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Funnily enough the community/free version works without issues. That really sucks if you're a paying customer.

not that surprising, since it probably doesn't have to phone home.

It does, but seemingly not as frequently. The community version seems to phone home every few months.

Now, the pirated version never phones home and always works even when MS decides to steal your products back.

Community needs to re-update your license every 30 days, so it would also stop working for someone who had that period ending during the outage.